The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In wireless mesh networks, at least some devices within a wireless mesh network may operate as a relay for other devices within the wireless mesh network, relaying communications between a gateway of the network and the other devices, or between any two or more devices within the network.
Devices acting as relays may remain in an active state, where the devices may continually listen for or relay communications from the other devices or the gateway to, or may transmit or receive the devices' own communications. When in the active state, the device may use more energy than when the device is operating in an idle state, which may occur when the devices are operating in an end point operation mode. For battery-powered devices, the additional energy draw of operating as a relay may cause the battery to be drained faster than when the devices operate in the end point operation mode. Further, having many devices operating as relays requires high amounts of routing control overhead, which may result in high energy draws from the devices and possible communication delays.
Legacy wireless mesh networks addressed these challenges by designating a single leader to gather state information for every device within the network to build an accurate view of the network deployment. Based on the view of the network deployment, the leader would determine which of the devices within the network should operate as relays and would provide requests to the devices to operate in relay operation mode. The single leader having to gather and store the state information for every device within the network required large amounts of memory and bandwidth. Further, the single leader dichotomy added significant amounts of communication overhead that would increase power consumption and degrade communication performance.